MIAMI — It was April 13, 2016, when Terry Collins, managing at Citi Field, for all intents and purposes declared the Mets’ eighth game of the season a must-win. He asked his closer Jeurys Familia to work a third straight day, and fourth in five days, to get five outs.
Familia doing his job that day, saving a Mets victory that ended a four-game losing streak, hardly made folks feel better about what transpired. Rightfully so.
The 2017 Mets suffered their second straight loss Saturday night, 5-4 at Marlins Park, because Collins went the opposite route. He played it super-safe at every turn, and the moves blew up in the form of back-to-back, eighth-inning homers by Christian Yelich and Giancarlo Stanton — the first one a two-one blast off Mets setup man Fernando Salas to obliterate a 4-2 Mets edge.
So if 367 days ago marked a moment to rip into a win, call this the time to defend a defeat. You can disagree with Collins’ decisions. But you can’t question the motivation behind them.
“We have made a commitment to take care of these guys,” a fiery Collins said after the game. “Make sure that we don’t overdo it.”
Collins faced two critical calls in the eighth inning. Neither worked out. First came his decision to lift Jacob deGrom after a dominant seven innings, in which the lanky right-hander tied a career high with 13 strikeouts. He struck out the last four batters he faced, and he ran his pitch count up to 97 by the time Asdrubal Cabrera’s solo homer in the top of the eighth gave the Mets a 4-2 lead.
It didn’t particularly surprise that Collins lifted deGrom, who now has a 1.89 ERA, at that juncture. It just stung because of the way it worked out.
“It’s easy to second-guess when we blow a save, ‘You could have ran Jake out there,’ ” a still-fiery Collins said. “We could have ran Jake out there. We have three pitchers [deGrom, Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler] that are coming off surgery. Now, if Jake goes out there and he gets in trouble, the immediate thing is, ‘Why didn’t you take him out?’ Right.
“I want to protect these guys. Jake was basically at 100 pitches. He was pitching great. That’s enough. Fernando Salas has done nothing but put up zeroes. So we went with that.”
DeGrom, not incidentally, did everything besides question his skipper.
“The goal is to be able to pitch all year. I wasn’t able to do that last year,” said deGrom, who didn’t pitch after Sept. 1, 2016, because of a right elbow affliction that required an operation. “It’s early in the season.”
While it is early, Salas registered his eighth appearance in 12 games over 13 days — though he did not pitch Friday. Maybe you can attribute his two-out walk to the light-hitting Miguel Rojas, after he retired Ichiro Suzuki and Dee Gordon, to fatigue. Salas said, “I’m good.”
Maybe, more to the point, Collins should have had his top lefty one-out guy Jerry Blevins ready to go against the dangerous lefty-hitting Yelich. Yet Blevins had thrown in each of the three prior games and four of the last five. Yelich crushed a game-tying homer to right field.
“Yeah, we could have gone to Blevins there,” Collins said. “If Yelich gets on, who do we go to then? That’s the other concern. You’ve got Stanton coming up. I wanted Salas to pitch to Stanton. That’s the way it is.”
The answer is, you go to Addison Reed for a four-out save. Again, though, Collins said he didn’t want to strain his temporary closer by asking him for the extra work.
The bottom line is, at the moment, Collins has a stellar starting rotation that still is on training wheels and a tired bullpen.
Tired from the team’s 16-inning win over the Marlins on Thursday night and tired as a result of the absence of the suspended Jeurys Familia, who will return Thursday.
“What are you gonna do?” Collins said. “That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got to get through it.”
The best way to get through it is to take a short-term loss for long-term gain. They got their short-term loss Saturday. We’ll wait a while to ensure it pays off.